Katawa Shoujo is a bishoujo-style visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located somewhere in modern Japan. Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends—and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right.
The Review:
Artwork:
Game artwork is mostly of a high quality, with photographic backgrounds (shifted a little out-of-focus to make them look a little less ‘real’) and clean character sprites that for the most part have a consistent look and feel throughout the game – the exception to this being a few of Emi’s sprites, which can apparently be blamed on her character receiving a redesign late in the development process. There’s a limited range of backgrounds and sprites on offer, so you will see a lot of repetition, but that’s not something that ever really bothered me. Event CG has a more stylised, less clean look about it, and a bit more liberties taken with the character designs, but they’re still good to look at. Each route also has its own animated sequence, played at the end of Act 1 to indicate which girl’s route your on – these are surprisingly well done, although again the character designs in these sequences don’t quite match the ones used elsewhere.
Text:
On-screen text comes in a comic-style sans serif font, set in white against a slightly transparent black background that helps it stand out against the background images beneath – it’s a good-looking font and easy to read. The speed at which text appears is controllable in the game options, but I found the default speed to be perfectly-paced.
Audio:
There are no recorded voices for this title, other than a background babble used for crowd scenes, so for the most part you’re left with the show’s extensive selection of background music themes, with each scene using theme(s) to fit the tone of the scene. I found myself making use of the in-built jukebox facility to listen back to several of the tunes, as many of them are really very good pieces of music. Tunes are in stereo, with no apparent audio problems that I could detect.
Packaging:
This title is download-only, so there’s no packaging.
Menu:
The game’s main menu is a cream / light brown screen, with the logo off to the top-right, a few pieces of lineart for decoration at bottom-right, and the available options set in the bottom-left corner: Start, Load, Options, Extras and Quit. The Extras option brings you to a submenu that gives further options: Jukebox, to play back music from the game; Gallery, which allows you to look at event CG without having to play the relevant scenes again; Library, which lists the scenes in each route and allows you to replay them if you feel the need; and Cinema, for playback of animated scenes. In each case, scenes / artwork etc are only available from these features once you’ve unlocked them in the game, with the Library also serving as a handy tool that can be used to check how far through the game you are or what scenes still need to be unlocked – just what you need if you’re chasing down the elusive 100% clear.
The Steamy Side:
Yes, there are sex scenes here – three for each path – but they’re mostly reasonably tasteful and, with one exception, not portrayed in an overly explicit way. The characters are a fairly adventurous bunch, though, as along with more ‘vanilla’ activities, the game features scenes of anal, blindfolds and being tied to chairs, amongst other diversions. If what’s here is too much for you, the sex scenes can be toggled off in the game options – this won’t change the storylines, you’ll just get some abstract screens in place of the explicit CG imagery.
There was apparently some debate within the dev team as to whether these scenes should even be included, and to be honest, if you’re playing Katawa Shoujo expecting much in the way of gratuitous titillation, you’re likely to end up disappointed. Which is in no way a criticism of the game. Only one or two of the sex scenes form pivotal plot moments, while a few others do feel as though they’ve been shoe-horned in solely to meet the 3-scenes-per-path quota. Most of them, though, are of the type where, taken in context of what’s happening in the storyline at the time, you could believe events going down that path – but you wouldn’t be missing out by not seeing them.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Inspired by some concept sketches drawn by RAITA, a Japanese doujinshi artist, and springing from a thread on 4Chan’s /a/ board that eventually led to the formation of Four Leaf Studios (who, while acknowledging their origins, are keen to point out that they’re an entirely separate entity from 4Chan), Katawa Shoujo is one of those ideas that could so easily have gone horribly wrong. Like many visual novels, the idea is simple: through making a series of decisions on his way through the game’s scenario, our lead male will find himself paired with one of the game’s female leads (if he’s lucky – the Manly Picnic awaits those who are too wishy-washy to impress) and led into a story about the subsequent ups and downs of their unfolding relationship.
Unusually, though, the setting here is a high school for students with need of specialist medical supervision: lead male Hisao is just out of an extended stay in hospital after being diagnosed with arrhythmia, a heart condition that could end his life very quickly if he doesn’t look after himself, and most of the school’s other students have afflictions of their own: Student Council president Shizune is deaf-mute; track star Emi lost both lower legs in a car accident, and is reliant on prosthetic legs to get around; genius artist Rin suffers from a birth defect that left her with no usable arms, and must paint with her feet; class rep Lilly is fully blind; and painfully shy classmate Hanako suffered extensive burns and scarring in a childhood accident. It’s the sort of material that can (and has) led to accusations of being exploitative, or of fetishising the conditions of the girls.
When I first became aware of the game’s development, my own first reflex (without having seen any of it at that point) would probably have been to agree. When 4LS released Act 1 of the game as a demo version back in 2009, I gave it a quick glance out of curiosity but, still being uncomfortable with the idea behind the game, I didn’t get too far into it before giving up. I was aware that the game was due to get its full release at the beginning of this year, but never had any real urge to give it a second chance – until a groundswell of positive comments on how well the game played and handled its subject matter started emerging, and prompted me to give it another try, just to see what all the fuss was about.
I’m glad that I did.
Most of your time with Katawa Shoujo will be spent reading – it’s called a “visual novel” for a reason. The decision points you meet and react to – plenty in Act 1, while the game is deciding what route to place you on, but with far fewer in the later acts – alter the flow of the story here and there, but at the end of the day this is a mostly-linear story of your in-game alter-ego Hisao, and a girl, which seems normal enough for this sort of thing. There are two things, though, that are particularly surprising about Katawa Shoujo.
The first is how well the issue of disabilities is handled: despite the “romancing disabled girls” aspect being a key part of the setting and the thing that gives the title its fame (or notoriety, depending on how you look at it), the message of the game is that people aren’t defined by their ability or disability, and when you’re playing through each girl’s route, their respective physical problems are never seen as being the issue that their route needs to address. Yes, they’re there, and they’re realistically dealt with (so far as I can tell – while some artistic license has been used, 4LS have apparently tried to keep the medical side of things as accurate as possible), but they’re not the main focus. Hisao may show curiosity about how Lilly “sees” the world, or about the accident that cost Emi her legs for example, but that’s treated as natural curiosity between people who are growing closer. The issues that the stories ultimately deal with are issues that anyone could have, given certain circumstances – poor self-worth, trust & bereavement issues, wanting to be understood by the people around you – and it’s something of a triumph in the way the game is presented that the disability “issue” is rendered irrelevant so effectively.
It’s also surprisingly well-written. The routes take different tacks – some are light and comedic, others dark and brooding, and some have significantly more decision points than others – but sooner or later, they all get to a core issue that the characters have to deal with, and at those points I was repeatedly surprised by how well the storylines grabbed me. There are elements to each plot that you can look at, and see parallels to other people or maybe to yourself, which in turn gives the game a way of drawing you in, getting you personally invested in the story that’s unfolding. It makes you really stop and think at every decision point you reach about what the ramifications of your choice will be, and there’s a constant “just one more scene…” feeling that’s difficult to resist. And then it’s 3am, you’re wondering where the time went, and wanting to continue playing as you can’t just leave things on the Bad End that you just encountered… Addictive? Oh yes, in spades.
The writing quality does vary from route to route, though, and I did feel that a lot more effort went into some routes compared to others. Shizune’s, for example, has only a single decision point and ends in a way that feels decidedly unfinished; some routes feel very natural in the way that the story unfolds, while others resort to what feels like forced drama to move things along at times. The varying quality does feed through to the amount of enjoyment that you’ll get out of a given route. But then, this is a volunteer project, and there are professional games I’ve played in the past that have felt less polished than this has. Five years in development seems a long time, but the end result of that is a set of stories that made me laugh, almost made me cry (sorry, that ability remains reserved to KEY adaptations for the time being), and kept me coming back for more until the progress meter ticked over to “100%” – and there are very few games that have ever managed to do that.
Saying that you read a visual novel “for the story” often seems to get the same response as saying you read Playboy “for the articles” – no-one really believes it. That may be a fair reaction in many cases – I’m willing to bet that there’s not much in the way of plot in something like Suck My Dick or Die, for example, but it’s unfair to use those titles as the basis on which to judge all visual novels. The percentage of VNs where story is king may be small – I don’t play enough of them to know for sure – but it’s certainly the case here.
In Summary:
So: put away any doubts you may have had about the game’s origins or subject matter; turn off the sex scenes if they make you uncomfortable. While I’ve never really been “into” visual novels – I don’t often have the free time or patience for the amount of time they need you to invest in them (getting a 100% clear in Katawa Shoujo with the help of an Act 1 walkthrough will take you around 25-30 hours) – I have long been a sucker for anime adaptations of them, particularly ones that play on the emotional side (KEY titles and similar). Katawa Shoujo, in its best routes, proves itself adept at just that sort of emotional manipulation, skillfully using it to draw you into some well-realised tales, and keeping your attention on them – and that, far more than any brief kicks you might get from the sex scenes, is what makes it worth taking a look at.
Grade: B+
Released By: Four Leaf Studios
Release Date: 4 January 2012
Required OS: Windows (XP or later), Mac OS X, Linux
Age Rating: 18+
MSRP: Free
Review Equipment:
17” Apple MacBook Pro, OS X 10.6.1 (Lion), 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz.
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